Walead Beshty is an artist and writer. Born in London, he undertook his artistic education in America, at Bard College and Yale University. He has since taught at various American academic institutions while pursuing his own creative endeavours.
Beshty is particularly known for his photographic works, although he also produces sculptures, paintings, videos and installations. Working in series, Beshty often creates photograms (photographs made without a camera) and applies specific constraints to their production to explore the capture and communication of physical limitations and tensions.
For the series entitled Picture Made by My Hand with the Assistance of Light, Beshty works with a large sheet of paper just within the confines of his physical reach. The sheet is crumpled and folded and then exposed to light. With his vision obscured by the darkness of the darkroom, he then manipulates the paper again before further light exposures.
The patterning of the image is thus the reflection of his gestures, within the scope of his physical size and the structure and weight of the paper, translated into the sheet and then recorded by exposure. The results are unpredictable, striking and beautiful, with multiple layers of meaning.
In the Black Curl series, Beshty unfurls a roll of photographic paper to the extent of his reach, but he affixes it to a wall, supported by magnets which remain in their original positions. He then curls and crumples the paper until it is within the exposure field. The next step is to expose it to colours in succession; the misregistration of them results as the paper is subjected to the conditions of the room, its vibrations, drafts and other physical conditions and is recorded.
As a result, the physical environment is made manifest in vivid technicolour. Each work is titled after the circumstances of its production in the following order: series, colour abbreviations listed in order of exposure, number of magnets, location, date, paper, emulsion, studio inventory number and then dated to the year of its first public presentation.